Category World News

President Donald Trump’s administration deported alleged members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua from the United States to El Salvador on Sunday, despite a court order prohibiting their expulsion from the country.

The move is the latest in a series of steps by the Trump administration to expel foreign nationals — some accused of being in the US without documentation, others targeted over campus protests.

Here is what happened, and whether it violated the court order.

What happened?

El Salvador President Nayib Bukele said on Sunday that his country had received 238 members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua and an additional 23 members of the Salvadoran gang MS-13 from the US.

Bukele had agreed to jail members of these groups on behalf of the US in a meeting with Secretary of State Marco Rubio last month.

He added that these deportees were in the custody of the Central American country’s Centre for the Confinement of Terrorism (CECOT) for a one-year period that could be extended.

During Trump’s inauguration speech, he said he would invoke the 1798 Alien Enemies Act. On Saturday, Trump signed a proclamation invoking that 227-year-old law. The proclamation claims that Tren de Aragua is “perpetrating, attempting, and threatening an invasion or predatory incursion” against US territory. It adds that all Venezuelan citizens aged 14 or older “who are members of” the gang and are not naturalised or lawful permanent US citizens are liable to be restrained and removed as “Alien Enemies”.

After Trump’s order, federal judge James Boasberg, the chief judge of the District Court for the District of Columbia, issued a temporary restraining order to block Trump’s ability to exercise wartime powers to carry out deportations. This was during a hearing on Saturday sought by the American Civil Liberties Union.

But hours later, Bukele confirmed that the Trump administration had nevertheless gone ahead with the deportations. He shared a snippet of a news article about the judge’s ruling, captioning it: “Oopsie … Too late”, with a crying-with-laughter emoji.

What is the Alien Enemies Act and how does it work?

The Alien Enemies Act allows the US president to detain or deport non-citizens during wartime conditions. In 1798, the US was preparing for what it believed was a war with France. The law was introduced to prevent immigrants from sympathising with the French.

The law allows the president to carry out these deportations without a hearing and based only on citizenship.

The Act has been invoked only three times before, during the War of 1812, World War I and World War II.

Why is this controversial?

While Trump and his allies have argued that the US is at threat of “invasion” of undocumented immigrants, critics say the president is wrongly invoking the wartime law.

An explainer published by the Brennan Center for Justice last year says invoking the Act “in peacetime to bypass conventional immigration law would be a staggering abuse”.

“The courts should strike down any attempted peacetime use of the Alien Enemies Act,” it adds.

The Fifth Amendment of the US Constitution protects the right to a grand jury. “No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a grand jury,” it states, adding that wartime is one of the few exceptions to this.

The fact that the Trump administration possibly defied a judge’s order further exacerbates this controversy.

The White House’s action was in “open defiance” of Judge Boasberg’s order, Patrick Eddington, a homeland security and civil liberties legal expert at the Washington, DC-based Cato Institute, told the Reuters news agency.

“This is beyond the pale and certainly unprecedented,” Eddington said.

But White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt has pushed back against the criticism.

“A single judge in a single city cannot direct the movements of an aircraft … full of foreign alien terrorists who were physically expelled from US soil,” Leavitt said in a statement posted on her X account on Sunday. She added that “federal courts generally have no jurisdiction over the President’s conduct of foreign affairs”.

Bruce Fein, an American lawyer specialising in constitutional and international law, disagreed.

“The President is not a king. January 20, 2025, was not a coronation. The President is not Napoleon … Federal courts have jurisdiction over the President,” Fein told Al Jazeera. “The probability that Trump flouted Judge James Boasberg’s order is high, but we need to await more due process,” he added.

The Administration did not ‘refuse to comply’ with a court order. The order, which had no lawful basis, was issued after terrorist TdA aliens had already been removed from U.S. territory. The written order and the Administration’s actions do not conflict. Moreover, as the Supreme… https://t.co/DnjUsuWTLH

Leavitt argued that by the time the court order was issued, the deportees had been removed from the US. The exact timings of the deportation flight are unclear.

Steve Vladeck, a professor at Georgetown University’s Law Center, posted on Bluesky that “a federal court’s jurisdiction does *not* stop at the water’s edge.” In other words, according to Vladeck, those deportees ought to be brought back to the US even if they had left the US airspace by the time the judge passed his order.

“The court’s jurisdiction turns on the presence of the defendant in the United States, not the plaintiffs,” Fein explained, adding that Trump, the defendant in this case, is in the US. “He could be ordered to return deportees who had been illegally deported to the United States.”

Why were these migrants sent to El Salvador?

Bukele is detaining the deportees under a deal where the US would compensate El Salvador to hold them, Bukele wrote in an X post. The Trump administration will pay approximately $6m to El Salvador for detaining about 300 alleged Tren de Aragua members from Venezuela for a year.

The Salvadorian president also shared a video on his account showing the handcuffed deportees being dragged and having their heads and faces shaved by masked El Salvador police officers.

“The United States will pay a very low fee for them, but a high one for us.”

Today, the first 238 members of the Venezuelan criminal organization, Tren de Aragua, arrived in our country. They were immediately transferred to CECOT, the Terrorism Confinement Center, for a period of one year (renewable).

The United States will pay a very low fee for them,… pic.twitter.com/tfsi8cgpD6

Venezuela has typically not accepted deportees from the US. The Trump administration has sent Venezuelan deportees to third countries in Central America “because the US does not have decent relations with Venezuela”, Clive Stafford Smith, a human rights lawyer, told Al Jazeera earlier.

Over the past month, Venezuela has accepted some 350 deportees, including about 180 detained at the Guantanamo Bay US naval base in Cuba, for 16 days. As of 2022, there were 275,000 unauthorised Venezuelan immigrants in the US, according to estimates by the Pew Research Center.

What is the CECOT?

The Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, which means the Centre for the Confinement of Terrorism, is a 40,000-capacity maximum-security prison in El Salvador. That is where the alleged gang members deported by the US are now being held.

The mega-prison prohibits visitation, education and recreation. Inmates are not allowed to go outdoors.

CECOT opened in January 2023, within a year of Bukele ordering the construction. It is located in Tecoluca, 72km (45 miles) east of the Salvadorian capital, San Salvador.

What is the Tren de Aragua?

Tren de Aragua, which is Spanish for “the train of Aragua”, is designated to be a “foreign terrorist organization” (FTO) by the US.

While information about the group is sparse, media reports have previously suggested that the group was formed in 2014 by Hector “El Nino” Guerrero and two other men who were imprisoned in Tocoron prison in the Venezuelan state of Aragua. The gang largely controlled the prison, ordering robberies, murders and kidnappings from behind bars.

The gang is alleged to be behind the 2024 murder of former Venezuelan army officer Ronald Ojeda, who conspired against President Nicolas Maduro. In January, Maduro was sworn in for his third six-year term after a contentious election.

A proclamation published by the White House alleges that Tren de Aragua “operates in conjunction with Cartel de los Soles, the Nicolas Maduro regime-sponsored, narco-terrorism enterprise based in Venezuela”.

What’s next?

On Sunday, Trump asked the DC Circuit Court for a stay of Boasberg’s order. “The stay will assuredly be denied within days,” Fein predicted.

In November 2023, Nariman Dzhelyal arrived in a icy Siberian jail and ate nothing but gruel and bread.

The devout Muslim is the bespectacled, bearded leader of the Crimean Tatar community. He claimed that pork was a major component of the meals he was served, which is against Islamic law.

Dzhelyal, who had been given a 17-year prison sentence for “blowing up a natural gas pipeline” and “smuggling explosives” in a trial Ukraine called Kremlin-orchestrated, told Al Jazeera, “I just took bread, it wasn’t of good quality, and ate it with tea.”

He refuted every claim made against him.

His diet slightly improved after arriving in Minusinsk, a dull town.

Only one lunch item had pork, and the rest of the meals had no flavor at all. Suppers had fish and only one of the lunches had pork.

However, the diet is not by far the biggest issue facing Russia’s infamously cruel penitentiary system’s tens of thousands of Muslims.

Soviet and Russian prisons have been characterized as a mysterious underworld governed by unwritten laws for almost a century.

The “crowned thieves” or “the black caste,” who have long since become criminals, still have elaborate tattoos, use sophisticated slang, and adhere to a strict, ruthless hierarchy.

The “black prisons” that they control are where wardens work with “crowned thieves” and ignore drug trafficking, card games, and extreme violence.

Wardens have control in “red prisons,” or “red prisons.” Career criminals have alleged that prison guards have provided inhumane conditions, including rape, solitary confinement, and torture.

Tens of thousands of Muslims have been found guilty of “terrorism,” “extremism,” or other crimes, but a third force has started to affect Russia’s prison population in the past two decades.

143 million people, or about 15% of Russia’s population, are Muslims. They represent the population’s population decline’s fastest-growing group.

According to Russian Mufti Albir Krganov, who reportedly made up 31, 000 of 206, 000 prisoners, in total, the number of prisons is roughly the same.

Since Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the prison population in Russia has more than halved. Unknown are the number of Muslims who volunteered or were drafted in exchange for pardons.

Russian convicts who convert to Islam are “automatically” listed as terror suspects, according to reports from rights organizations and media outlets, and have their sentences sporadically shortened for “extremism.”

Former analyst with Russia’s top prisoner-related organization, the Federal Service for Execution of Punishment, Anna Karetnikova, told Al Jazeera, “If a convict converts to Orthodox Christianity and gets baptized, he’ll be celebrated.”

According to Karetnikova, who previously worked at an agency overseeing penitentiaries in Moscow and at the Memorial rights group, “he will be listed as someone prone to extremism, his prison’s administration will be punished,” and intelligence services will pay particular attention to him.

According to rights groups, Central Asian Muslim migrants who work in Russia face criminal punishment because of their poor knowledge of Russian law and customs, according to rights groups.

Some people have been forced to fight in Ukraine, according to reports, while others have claimed that Russian police and prosecutors have targeted and prosecuted them for crimes they have committed.

In 2022, Abdulaziz, a construction worker in Moscow, claimed police had planted synthetic substances known as “spice” on his younger brother Abdulmumin.

Abdulmumin allegedly “confessed” to putting drug stashes under park benches after being electrocuted and beat him with plastic water bottles that leave no bruises.

Then, according to Abdulaziz, a judge sentenced Abdulmumin to five and a half years in prison in the Ural Mountains region, adding that, thanks to the number of “green” prisoners there, there are still enough “green” prisoners, referring to Muslim prisoners.

The only problem is the guards, he said, “They proved themselves on the zone” and, using a slang term for jail, “they proved themselves on the zone.” They also use a blind eye when required.

Abdulaziz declined to provide his last name and other details. His claims were not independently verified by Al Jazeera.

Muslim prisoners are not well suited in some Russian jails.

According to rights groups, schedules in some prisons forbid eating and leaving beds between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m., making each early morning and late evening prayer a violation. Some convicts find it difficult to work during the Ramadan.

However, there are attempts to educate prison staff.

They must be taught the fundamentals of Islam, as well as the psychology of the [Muslim] prisoners they employ. According to Azat Gaunutdinov, an ethnic Tatar man who converted to Islam in prison and founded a rights organization to monitor the rights of Muslim convicts, “a Muslim prayer alone is a manifestation of extremism”,” he told the Kavkazsky Uzel news website in 2020.

Depending on the prisons, the situation frequently changes.

Dzhelyal, the Crimean Tatar leader, was given leniency by the wardens in Minusinsk, where he spent the majority of his sentence.

He and other Muslims were permitted to pray in their beds and consume their meals during the Ramadan.

Rights groups claim that they could borrow the Quran and other Muslim books from the prison library, in contrast to Muslims in other prisons, where the Quran and Arabic are completely forbidden and only some Russian translations are permitted.

Some jailed Muslims, such as those who smuggle cigarettes, mobile phones, or alcohol and drugs, refuse to engage in illegal activities while they are imprisoned, according to Dzhelyal.

“We have no use for these criminal rules of yours,” claim some Muslims, in fact. Because of the fact that [these rules] frequently conflict with the values that all Muslims live by, Dzhelyal said.

When the second Chechenya war broke out in the early 2000s, the number of Muslim prisoners in Russian jails started to rise.

In other North Caucasus provinces, particularly in multiethnic Dagestan, the Kremlin stepped up its clampdown on what it called “extremists.” There were many jails.

At least 59 people were killed when a fire broke out at an illegal nightclub in North Macedonia, resulting in the arrest of around 20 people. The club’s only exit, which was used to get away from the victims, was mostly made up of young adults who were trapped inside.

At least 39 people have died as a result of a powerful storm system that over the weekend threw severe tornadoes, dust storms, and wildfires across central and southern America.

On Monday, the southeastern and mid-Atlantic regions of the US were impacted by the weakening but still unpredictable weather system, which resulted in widespread destruction, causing hundreds to flee their homes and destroying their fragile communities.

The system appeared to have calmed down, but it still produced tornadoes, damaging winds, and thunderstorms. Heavy rain and dangerous winds were a problem for forecasters in areas across New York and New England, from Florida to New Jersey.

Residents of parts of North Carolina and Virginia are being warned of wind gusts up to 70 mph (113 km/h) and hailstones the size of ping pong balls by the US National Weather Service, which issued a tornado watch early on Monday.

Weather with “high risk” and devastating losses

Meteorologists have labeled the storm front, which started on Friday, as a rare “high-risk” event. Although this extreme weather is not typical in March, the system caused significant damage to a sizable area.

As tornadoes destroyed homes and destroyed towering trees in Tylertown, Mississippi, causing complete destruction to entire neighborhoods. More than 200 residents were displaced, according to Tate Reeves, the governor, who confirmed that six people had lost their lives.

Texas and Oklahoma were ravaged by wind-driven wildfires. Nearly 400 homes were damaged or destroyed by a 130 fire that was reported by authorities alone in Oklahoma. According to governor Kevin Stitt, the state’s extreme weather and fires caused two fatalities.

In Texas, wildfires forced evacuations, and the devastation persisted. In addition to the deaths reported, two vehicles were involved in dust storms.

A multi-vehicle pileup occurred in Kansas as a result of the lack of visibility. At least 50 vehicles collided in the collision that left eight people dead.

Communities are dealing with the effects of tornadoes.

As tornadoes swept across central Alabama, killing three people, including an 82-year-old woman, were the result of the storms. A nearby recreation center that doubles as a shelter was hacked overnight in Troy, making residents look for alternative lodging.

Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders confirmed three deaths in Arkansas, which prompted the deployment of National Guard troops to aid in rescue and recovery efforts.

President Donald Trump stated that the White House would assist local and state officials in the recovery.